Currently working on a research paper? Will you be working on a research paper soon? Not working on a research paper? Or, do you just need a way to organize your thoughts? Some of us like to use good old paper index cards to do so… but why kill trees, when you can just use Thoughtbox.es? It allows you, after registering a free account with your email address, to create up to three “trains of thought” for free with numerous “thoughtboxes” per train. If you really like it, you can upgrade to the “super” version by paying $1.25 a month, or $15 a year, which… if this helps you, might not be too bad of an investment. For the record, I have no affiliation with this website, I just think that this is a great way to do research papers, because it also allows you to *share* those trains of thought with others, making it a great collaboration tool. Enjoy!

This week’s tech tip deals with graphing calculators once again… This time, it’s not some lame online graphing calculator that sometimes sort of works… This one’s real! Microsoft has released Microsoft Mathematics, which you install onto your computer and will let you graph 2D and EVEN 3D equations! This is all for free, and it looks to be absolutely excellent… give it a try. Download here.

Ever gotten an assignment from a teacher, who gives you a piece of paper with the URL of webpages you have to go to? And aren’t they *always* about 50 thousand characters long? At least! Or, perhaps, wanted to show a friend an eBay auction, but didn’t want to write down the entire, huge, address for it. What does one do? Well, it’s time for a URL shortening service, my friend. How do they work? Well, it’s simple: you go to the website of the URL shortening services, paste in the long URL you wish to share, and it’ll spit a shorter one back at you! Where can you find one of these newfangled sites, you ask? There are quite a few which do a decent job. A year or so ago, I would have told you tinyurl.com would be the place to go… Today, bit.ly is, in my opinion, a superior URL shortening service. It allows you to track how many people used your short URL, how many people tweeted about that short URL, and allows you to customize the short URL into something you can remember. It’s really neat, and really convenient!

Also, try dragging this link ( Bit.ly sidebar ) to your bookmarks bar… it’ll let you bit.ly ANY webpage in one click!

Did you get a new iPod for Christmas, and already fill it to capacity with music? There’s a ton of people in that boat… Luckily for you, you don’t have to go down with them. Didn’t you realize? You can compress your MP3 files further without any compromise in quality! This means smaller file sizes for the same quality and amount of music. How? WinMP3Packer is a program which will convert your MP3s to VBR or variable bitrate MP3s. They will still work perfectly fine in any MP3 player, iPod, or digital music device! Download it from here.

This week’s tech tip is a very special one… It will NOT help you fix your computers, or anything of the sort, but it’s lovely nevertheless! Google is offering a service that allows you to have Santa call your friends or family! Fill out a few questions on SendacallfromSanta.com, and Santa will call or email them, with a special message just for them! Give it a try!

With all this snowy weather we’ve been getting in the winter metropolis that is the Greater Rochester area, it pays to know what’s going on all across the county! If you, say, are heading downtown, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly what weather you’re going to encounter on the way down there? Well, the Weather Underground, at wunderground.com, has a feature called the WunderMap, which plots temperature, wind speed, direction, and conditions for tons of weather stations across the county. You’d be surprised to see exactly how many weather stations are in the Greater Rochester area! Take a look, at www.wunderground.com/wundermap.

This week’s tech tip comes from a request from Shavonna Hinton, a senior at Thomas… She was in the middle of applying for a scholarship which offered its application in the very popular PDF file format. Rather than printing it and hand-writing it, she decided she would try to format and type it on the computer, to make it neater. There was only one problem… she wasn’t sure how to edit PDF documents! Luckily for her, there’s a few different solutions. One of the simplest is PDFEscape.com, which lets you fill in PDF forms, as well as annotate, highlight, and do other simple edits to PDF documents. You can also try Foxit Editor (free version), or Google around for more!

“OK, class… you’re going to have to make a Powerpoint presentation for this project… Make it interesting!” When one hears this words, you can almost guarantee that 75% of the class will end up using some form of the dreaded, cliche-d Screenbeans, or some other horribly plain clipart that comes with Powerpoint. The other 24% will think that they’re clever, and will go to Google Images to find low-resolution, poor-quality images for their presentation. Either way, the results are… lack-luster, to say the least. If you really want to give a professional-looking touch to your Powerpoints, try using stock photos. There are images normally taken by professional photographers (which means high-quality) that are provided so that you are actually legally allowed to use them in your presentations. There are many free stock photo websites out there, Morguefile.com being one of them, as well as Sxc.hu, and StockVault.net. There are tons of free stock photo sites out there, full of high-quality photos to give your Powerpoint presentation that high-quality finish, and perhaps a few extra points!

So have you ever been having a discussion with someone, and you know exactly what you want to say, but you’re completely blanking out on the word or words for what you mean? It’s okay, we all have those moments… Chirag Mehta, an Indian computer geek (if you will), decided that he had enough of this inability to remember the right word for your situation. In despair, he created “Tip of My Tongue,” a project on his website which lets you put partial bits or letters of a word, or even words similar to what you mean, and it will list back the words it could possibly be! Give it a try at http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/.

This week’s tech tip is for you avid shoppers of all kinds… We all love saving money, of course, and with Internet shopping today, we are able to save more money than ever before. I found a site, however, that will maximize the amount of money you save when shopping on the Internet for tons of major online retailers, as well as actual brick-and-mortar stores. RetailMeNot has hundreds of coupons and coupon codes for everything from groceries to photo prints to hotels, and a plethora of other items. RetailMeNot.com is the site, give it a try, see how it works for you!